Access Now:

In May 2024, Access Now’s Caterina Rodelli travelled across Greece to meet with local civil society organisations supporting migrant people and monitoring human rights violations, and to see first-hand how and where surveillance technologies are deployed at Europe’s borders. In the first of a three-part blog series reflecting on what she saw, Caterina explains how, all too often, digitalising borders dehumanises the people trying to cross them.

In May 2024, just a few weeks after the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum was approved, I travelled to Greece to see for myself how digital surveillance is being deployed against migrant people as they try to enter Europe. What quickly became clear on the ground was how the digitalisation of border management is a key part of the dehumanisation process inherent within the EU’s migration policy.

As the Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice has pointed out, the EU’s “Fortress Europe” approach treats every migrant as a security threat by default, implying that they are “racially different, inferior, and a threat to the European project” — and technology is deployed at the borders with this in mind. But in contrast to claims that such digital tools are “neutral” or “objective,” the use of automatic decision-making and surveillance technology has been shown to reinforce existing inequalities, and to punish already systematically oppressed people. 

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